ABSTRACT

Yet Flanders was not simply an academic with a strong interest in the theory and practice of industrial relations but was throughout his life a dedicated and infl uential political activist who played a key role in debates within British social democracy. Originally trained in the early 1930s in Germany as a revolutionary ethical socialist, he was a leading member of the Socialist Vanguard Group (SVG) in the 1930s and editor of its political magazine from 1934. From the early 1940s he gradually abandoned his revolutionary politics as he began to work inside the Labour Party and continued to chair the editorial board of the SVG’s magazine, now renamed Socialist Commentary, until his death in 1973. Re-launched in 1947, Socialist Commentary soon became the leading outlet for ‘revisionist’ socialist thinking in Britain in the post-war period. Another key organization in the revisionist debates of that period was Socialist Union, an ethical socialist ‘think tank’ co-founded by Flanders in 1951 and for which he co-authored its two major publications, Socialism: A New Statement of Principles (1952) and Twentieth Century Socialism (1956).6 Finally, in the early 1960s Flanders became a leading member of the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS), the center-right Labour faction formed to defend party leader Hugh Gaitskell against a resurgent Labour and trade union left.7